Slice of Life: Lured by Words

I join my fellow bloggers in "serving up a slice"

to the Tuesday Slice of Life (SOL) community.

Thanks to Stacey, Betsy, Beth, Kathleen,
Deb, Melanie, Lanny, and Kelsey

 for hosting this meeting place each Tuesday
and nurturing our writing lives.

I can't help myself. I'm bewitched by words. And so when I read, I notice words and become enchanted.

Two of the excerpts I'm sharing today come from my current read, Love Walked In by Marisa De los Santos.

"There's a kind of tenderness that's only possible in the predawn hours, a blue-gray, lonely tenderness that comes from dim lights and sleepiness and immense quiet. A kind of tenderness and a kind of hope." (p. 187)

Lovely words and description, don't you agree?

"That evening, after dinner, Clare went into Cornelia's bedroom to write what Teo had said to her about being good in her journal. Getting the words right mattered, but so did describing his voice when he talked and capturing the feeling that filled her as he spoke and after he spoke. She thought about that word 'capture,' how it put a writer on par with a fur trapper or big-game hunter, and how it implied that stories were whole and roaming around loose in the world, and a writer's job was to catch them. Except of course that a writer didn't kill what she caught, didn't stuff it and hang it on a wall; the point was to keep the stories alive." (p. 205)

I'm so glad that writers catch the stories that are roaming around loose in the world and share them with us, the readers. I'm sure that I'll finish this book today and then it's on to my next read to fulfill one of the categories on my 2018 Reading Challenge, 10 to Try from KCLS (King County Library System). The category is "Read a book in translation." And the book I've chosen is The Book of Pearl by Timothy de Fombelle, translated from French by Sarah Ardizzone & Sam Gordon. It showed up on my hold shelf at the library, but I'm not sure who led me to it. Here are the words about the setting that captured me (from the inside flap) and made me move it to the top of my WTR (want to read) pile:

"Joshua Pearl comes from a world that we no longer believe in - a world of fairy tales. He knows that his great love is waiting for him somewhere in that realm, but he is trapped in an unfamiliar place - an old-world marshmallow shop in Paris on the eve of World War II." (inside flap)

I was totally captivated by the place - an old-world marshmallow shop in Paris - and the time period, the eve of World War II. How about it? What words lure you into the world of story? Are there specific ways that you become enchanted when you pick up a book?